I am posting my response to a quote on my Facebook page commenting on the now infamous article published November 19th, 2014, in Rolling Stone Magazine by Sabrina Rubin Erdely entitled “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA.”
I wrote it before I actually read Sabrina’s Rolling Stone article. I knew what the article was about because I know what’s going on at UVA in regards to search for Hannah Graham, the missing UVA student, now found and a known victim of a brutal rape and murder and other related murders by the same suspect.
Also, particularly, because I am from Virginia and am now living in Virginia. I frequently am in Charlottesville and the recent tragic rape and murder of a young female UVA student has been all over the media here lately.
The cult of silence around all victims that the schools encourage through subtle and not so subtle means. And, the article culminates in the most current news that went national maybe even international. (I read the entire Rolling Stone article after I wrote the following)
This article Rolling Stone article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely is for EVERYONE. We ALL read this in its ENTIRETY…. Down to the very last word… and share it… with everybody… its a matter of life and death and a matter of everything in between… for all of us….
To read the Rolling Stone Article, A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA, click here.
An outspoken, empowered human being @Stargatez posted the above article on FB tonight with the words:
“If we just loved one another and acted with kindness and compassion and true “finesse” things like this wouldn’t happen! Respect one another and you gain respect, conduct the opposite, you reap what you sow…”
The above 2 sentence quote was written in the comment area above the article.
Here’s my reply:
Sarah West Let’s see… we’re a Consciousness that is raised on the perpetual abuse of Coyote and Roadrunner and Square Bob Sponge Pants and other abuse demonstrated in supposed comedy – and tragedy – scenarios fed to children – and adults (sorry, i’m simplifying. I’m writing this on my cell phone keypad with my thumbs… inspires brevity, assumes YOU KNOW what I mean … when I don’t furnish what seems obvious to me… plus, its past 5 am and I still haven’t gone to sleep so… ) – of all ages in film and TV all our lives if we watch film and TV… we listen to dialog of people around us i.e. parents etc. Who express their dissatisfaction and dominance simultaneously all the while pretending its love through sarcasm.
We’ve grown up with domestic violence and no one is aloud to speak about it. The shame of outing the abuser is so strong that we don’t even let ourselves KNOW that label applies to us – as in that the label “domestic violence” describes the environment that we, ourselves, grew up in.
Who in their mind has said, “Oh, that’s awful. Its so tragic what people are raised in. Yes, I grew up with difficult things… but, when does it dawn on us, when does the tyranny of force-fed denial and keeping the secret “or else” come tumbling down crashing in on us that – we, too, lived, were raised with what is termed “domestic violence”.
Yes, many have but no matter the numbers, no matter the normalcy, it still leaves a scare – a SCAR! Typo was unconscious. Not surprised those words are so close…
.:.
We’ve heard the words all our lives and – suddenly, it clicks – the words are like a gun cocking that we heard so many times and now we know those words aren’t just for others, but for us, too….
QUESTION:
Why do some who are victims of abuse become abusers and why do others become healers & advocates for transformation? Why do some effort to grow and evolve and see our faults and see help, educate ourselves and change and others continue the abuse through denial and multiple-personality traits of coping and worse yet, become psychopaths, megalomaniacs and sociopaths?
Why do some choose compassion and others choose violence and perpetuate their pain by punishing others?
Why?
I’ve seen all my life since I could first see and hear, the terror in the hearts of those who choose to abuse others instead of have understanding of themselves and others.
I’ve witnessed violence since I could first hear that tore at the fabric of psyches which did not make it thru the battleground unscathed or at all. They became more and more tormented until they self-destructed.
Why do some terrorists make it and some don’t?
Why do some abusers seem to thrive and continue to abuse while their victims wait in vain for them to awaken and then die or painfully continue to acquiesce only to protest in silence or at least out of fear of the terrifying tyrant.
How bullies and terrifying tyrants control their victims through long term programing…. is a wild thing to witness… whether in another or within oneself….
Soooooo, the question is:
HOW DO WE STAND UP FOR OURSELVES, each other, Mother Earth, our water, innocent animals going extinct, tribes going extinct, air quality now labeled poison i.e. China’s biggest cities, the earth fracked to death, stealing water from aquifers for coal mining, molybdenum mining etc…. moving in on people’s land, killing them by any means, and Taking over…
I mean, we don’t exactly have it in our jeans, or genes, to be compassionate, altruistic much if the time… because if we DID, why the Heaven AREN’T we????
PS I’m sooooo grateful this reality of RAPE CULTURE is coming out…. being exposed at UVA.
Rape has been rampant in campuses (anywhere, everywhere since I don’t know when the first case of rape in creatures was… but, there certainly has been complicit agreement to let it continue all over this world) since campuses began….
And now, just now, after all the victims over so many years who spoke out and who didn’t speak out… the number of voices are making ‘the system’ listen… finally…. it’s a new time…
Perhaps, some tides are actually changing.
The day RAPE is addressed and dealt with as it should, is the day EVERYTHING changes…
For this behavior of “RAPE and ESCAPE”, as I call it, is the same in all these other areas of life… I grew up witnessing rape…
I swore two things when I was 11.
One of them them was I swore I would never get married. I saw marriage as legalized prostitution and a man’s ownership and right to abuse a woman. I wanted no part of that system. Sadly, it’s an interesting journey to take back a vow but that’s another story…
…
How complicit are all or us, are any of us, who witness RAPE on any level and of any kind? At what age are we accountable to our fellow humans, our fellow creatures, our fellow creation?
How do we even stop the abuse when we have been so trained to be complicit? Really?
We can’t even SEE ourselves? We can’t even HEAR our own pain?
Compassion?
Where, when do we have compassion for oursleves?
That’s where it begins. If we have not it there, here. If we have no compassion for ourselves – if we have no experience with how to give ourselves compassion…. then, we cannot GIVE it to anyone else!!
We cannot!
It is the double bind of well-planned psychosis for the masses
to be bit by an instinct that is not born out of survival
but turned and twisted and connived in on itself
to never fully thrive, to never fully fly,
and to make darn sure no one else does.
…
Is there ever justice?
Like in the movie Erin Brokovich?
What about all those that already died? There was no justice.
What about all the firemen who went in to the towers to save people, and now, those that lived can’t breath… or pay for their “drugs” prescribed by the allopathy…
Or, Native People’s who’ve been slowly murdered by interlopers who want the land to breed cows and soybeans to feed the overpopulated world no matter what the consequences to the lungs of our earth and the people who’ve lived their for forever….
…
So, RAPE is an institution. It is a status quo like cowboy hats in the south, like big hair in Texas and tinsel in tinsel town.
And, greed in lawyers… my brain isn’t smart enough right now to say another analogy… you’ve got a smarter one… (its now after 6 am and I’m brief on what’s obvious to me cuz I’m tired and still compelled to express this…)
RAPE isn’t going anywhere as long as we have a closed door, a forest, a curtain AND more precisely:
“It” – RAPE – can happen RIGHT IN FRONT OF US and we will do nothing!
BECAUSE we are CONDITIONED to DO NOTHING!!!
If we doubt, just think… just let our mind wonder… in the privacy OF one’s own mind, choose honesty, and then, SEE… see what you SEE….
It will come to us…
ALL the things that we have seen and DENIED…. all the things that we have HEARD and silenced… any rebuttal…
All the things that we have been SOLD as TRUTH that we BOUGHT without remorse that were, ARE LIES and perpetuate the abusers liberations and lacerations.
JUST to maintain our own STATUS QUO within… and without.
… To not shake up the rattling cage too much to waking the sleeping giant who will one day have enough and will rage like Kali at the lies we’ve all lived as the earth goes on without the humans any longer lying their way into eternity’s safe bosom.
© 2014 Sarah West
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Happy Thanksgiving!!!
The above is an article I just finished writing….
PS i think this is a good Thanksgiving article if there ever was/is one come to think of it.It might seem odd at first but really, who can’t relate to the topic?
Who on this earth isn’t connected, touched by this topic. This is the perfect topic for us because in order to change our reality, we have to be aware of it and share together what our concerns are and experience has been.
We have to come out of the proverbial closet and speak, share, emote, effulge, effervesce, unfurl and bond through the unity of our shared experiences, hidden or out in the open, to connect and experience the one true desire we all have: true intimacy. And, that’s worth having Thanksgiving for!
For instance, as a human in this wild world full of contradictions, trials and tribulations, difficult childhoods to say the least – God bless those of you who don’t know what I mean!!
I mean, if I can wrap my conditioned afraid consciousness so bullied and blind as to walk sheepishly and huddled as close to the tar pit as possible to one day CHANGE and WAKE out of my denial-stupr and welll-trained victim consciousness, I’d be the most grateful soul on (h)eart(h)… along with the rest of those who’ve woken from fear.
Which, who isn’t?
…Really?
Who isn’t paralyzed by fear?
Of something?
In some manner?
Of course, that’s not all any of us are, hopefully, but we each carry some level of fear.. some level of devive that we have to hurl ourselves away from, integrate, grow through, learn from and learn to live with, understand and, hopefully, “transform”.
Don’t we all need to wake up, rise up, empower ourselves to speak our minds more often, more clearly, more honestly?
My article I just wrote: finished editing it just now… wrote it tonight on my cell phone!
.:.
SARAH WEST LOVE ❤️ HEALING MUSIC 